Introduction: Crossdisciplinary Italian Urban Spaces

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Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space giulio giovannoni silvia ross

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Cross-Disciplinary Approaches

to Italian Urban Space

edited by

giulio giovannoni silvia ross with contributions by teresa v.sá, luca pocci, richard ingersoll, remi wacogne, francesca mugnai, serena acciai, donata panizza, giulia brecciaroli,

marzia beltrami, meris nicoletto, assunta de crescenzo, vincenzo binetti

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The essays contained in this volume are the result of activities carried out by the Cross-Disciplinary Urban Space research network. The network was established by Giulio Giovannoni and Silvia Ross in 2015 in order to advance the debate on urban space from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space examines the city and its environment through theoretically-informed essays stemming from a variety of disciplines, including urban planning, architecture, cultural geography, architectural history, heritage studies, film studies, literary studies and photography. Updates on the activities of the research network can be accessed at: www. crossdisciplinaryurbanspace.com.

The volumes are subject to a qualitative process of acceptance and evaluation based on peer review, which is entrusted to the Scientific Publications Committee of the Department of Architecture (DIDA) with blind review system. Furthermore, all publications are available on an open-access basis on the Internet, which not only favors their diffusion, but also fosters an effective evaluation from the entire international scientific community.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Florence Publication Fund and of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Studies Research Publication Fund, University College Cork.

Printed on paper Fedrigoni FreeLife Vellum didapress

ISBN 978-88-3338-088-9 graphic design

didacommunication lab Dipartimento di Architettura Università degli Studi di Firenze Susanna Cerri

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indice indice 9 39 65 89 105 133 157 Introduction: Crossdisciplinary Italian Urban

Spaces

Giulio Giovannoni, Silvia Ross

PART I. Theorizing Space(S) And The Environment Henri Lefebvre, Urban Society and Everyday Life Teresa V. Sá

Franco Arminio and the Heterotopia of comunità provvisoria

Luca Pocci

Public Space in the Age of Climate Change Richard Ingersoll

The Social Life of Non-Places: Lessons from Florentine Peripheries

Giulio Giovannoni

Is There Space for Heritage in Marghera? Remi Wacogne

PART II. Representing Urban Space: Literature, Film, Photography

The Literary Image of Brunelleschi’s Dome Francesca Mugnai, Serena Acciai

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Florence Overexposed: Early Photography and the Production of the Cinematic City

Donata Panizza

Uncanny City: An Exploration of Milan and Turin in the work of Giorgio Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini (1960s-1970s)

Giulia Brecciaroli

Natalia Ginzburg and Gendered Space: Country, City and House between Fascist Womanhood and Feminist Liberation

Silvia Ross

Urban Space as Cognitive Metaphor? Suggestions from Alessandro Baricco’s City Marzia Beltrami

Turin: ‘Narrating Architecture’ Meris Nicoletto

Naples in Antonella Cilento’s Narrative: “un corpo di animale antico” (“an ancient animal’s body”) Assunta De Crescenzo

“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”: Narrating Transnational Urban Spaces as Fluid Forms of Resistance and Conflict

Vincenzo Binetti NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 177 205 229 253 279 303 331 355

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Cross-Disciplinary Approaches

to Italian Urban Space

edited by

giulio giovannoni silvia ross

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Giulio Giovannoni, Silvia Ross

introduction: crossdisciplinary italian introduction: crossdisciplinary italian urban spaces

urban spaces

Urban Space and Cross-Disciplinarity

Urban space is the physical continuum on which hu-man existence and social life unfold, with their complex-ities and contradictions, conflicts and fights, passions and needs. However, urban space is not simply a container for human and social life, neutral like an empty theatre stage which waits to be used by actors and performers. Al-though inert and difficult to transform, urban space has a natural tendency to form an indistinguishable whole with the society which inhabits and shapes it. Social structures, as well as power relations, resident cultures, and modes of production are differently encoded within it. Spa-tial transformations signify social dynamics and chang-es which are often conflicting and contradictory. Urban planners and designers tend to ignore their controversial and problematic role, hiding themselves behind the sup-posed neutrality of technical expertise. This is one of the reasons why it is important to reconsider critically the no-tion of urban space from diverse disciplinary perspectives, in order to gain a better awareness of the many implica-tions of urban design and the representation of the built

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10 giulio giovannoni, silvia ross

environment in cultural production. At the same time, the use of spatial theory, along with architectural and ge-ographical thought, for instance, can unlock innovative and thought-provoking interpretations of cultural pro-duction such as novels, short stories, film, art or photogra-phy, providing thus a new window not only on our views of these texts but also contributing to a deepening of un-derstanding within the Humanities of pressing urban and environmental issues.

We are convinced, therefore, of the benefits of a cross-dis-ciplinary study of the topic of urban space, and maintain that the different points of view represented here enable original insights into timely questions concerning urban life, society and space. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines including urban de-sign, literary studies, film studies, photography, and ur-ban and architectural history. Drawing on case studies predominantly from modern and contemporary Italy, the collection of essays serves to juxtapose these diverse per-spectives on the theme of urban space in novel and stimu-lating ways, ranging from a reconsideration of classic spa-tial theory (Lefebvre), to representations of urban spaces across Italy (Florence, Milan, Turin, Naples, Marghera), and consideration of the environmental implications of climate change on the built environment.

Cross-disciplinarity/Interdisciplinarity/Transdiscipli-narity and Originality of Thought

Much has been published on the concept of Interdisci-plinarity, especially as many higher education institutions have in recent years been extolling the practice (although,

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11 introduction

admittedly, not always for entirely convincing pedagogi-cal or epistemologipedagogi-cal reasons)1_{. That said, as a research}

practice, cross-disciplinary investigations yield, in our ex-perience, original insights and have served to foster crea-tive synergies, leading to thought processes that might oth-erwise remain obscure or inaccessible.

Our intent here is not to disparage a discipline-based formation, in fact, precisely the opposite: we are firm-ly convinced of the need for individual disciplines and the value in disciplines defining themselves and form-ing scholars within their recognized and commonly-de-fined spheres. As researchers, we credit our deep engage-ment with our respective disciplines as having given us the key instruments with which to interpret our fields and, in turn, as having furnished us with the tools with which to teach our discipline to undergraduate and graduate stu-dents. At the same time, we wish to underscore that it is precisely when different disciplines come into contact with each other that a sparking-off of critical thought of-ten takes place, allowing us to pay atof-tention to some ne-glected aspect of our subject and enabling a

cross-polli-1_{We have opted for the term ‘cross-disciplinarity’ but, for all intents and}

purposes, are using it interchangeably with ‘interdisciplinarity’ or ‘trans-disciplinarity’. We have not made a distinction here, but others have sought to do so: “Some scholars draw clear distinctions between research that is cross-disciplinary or multidisciplinary (contributions from two or more fields to a research problem), interdisciplinary or pluridisciplinary (integration of knowledge originating in two or more fields), or trans-dis-ciplinary (knowledge produced jointly by distrans-dis-ciplinary experts and social practitioners) […]. Others are more comfortable with looser distinctions. We count ourselves among the latter group and in this article use interdis-ciplinary and interdisciplinarity as general terms for describing interrela-tionships among academic disciplines” (Jacobs and Frickel 45).

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nation of concepts that would otherwise not occur2_.

Fur-thermore, certain over-arching themes, ideas or theories often cut across disciplinary borders; that said, there is a clear usefulness to attempting to understand just how dif-ferently interpreted such meta-themes are, according to subject area.

Critics have regularly indicated the advantages of inder-disciplinarity with respect to generating new thought and creativity. Patrick Dunleavy, for instance, states that:

being original in the modern social sciences and humani-ties is rarely about coming up with an entirely new way of looking at things. Instead, it is mostly a more modest activ-ity. Here originality involves encountering an established idea or viewpoint or method in one part of your discipline (or in a neighbouring discipline) and then taking that idea for a walk and putting it down somewhere else, applying it in a different context or for a different purpose. This characteristic also explains why the fringes of disciplines are often the most productive areas for new approaches. It is here that scholars are often most actively borrowing or adapting ideas developed in one discipline to do work in another (p. 40).

Dunleavy’s comments on working on the margins of dis-ciplines and the advantages of slippage across subject bor-ders constitute a form of advice to doctoral candidates who are seeking to articulate their research project’s con-tribution to existing knowledge.

Carol Becker, on the other hand, in her article ‘Interdis-ciplinarity’, reflects on her own work across disciplinary 2_{Interdisciplinarity is not without its sceptics: sociologists Jacobs and}

Frickel, for example, critically examine the concept and remain un-convinced of the superiority of interdisciplinary knowledge over discipli-nary knowledge (p. 60).

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13 introduction

boundaries. The critic explains that she received a ‘ver-tical’ training in her subject (English Literature) but that when she started teaching in an Art Institute she realized how much creativity was in fact linked to reflection on the creative process and to working across different areas (drawing, sculpture, video, etc.). Thus, she also advocates thinking that is ‘horizontal’, that is, across disciplines, since subject boundaries can be too restrictive:

Fields have expanded and exploded as thoughts have changed. Such movement could be understood as a rev-olution in thinking or similar to that which occurs in the development of language, simply a natural evolution. Ide-as locked into a disciplinary structure too prescriptive and constrictive to contain all the thinking and doing that em-anates from them, eventually move on to create new mani-festations, to break free of the restrictions that once defined them and limited their growth. (pp. 197-98)3

Significantly, Becker stresses the necessity for open-ing our boundaries by discussopen-ing our situatedness in the world, leading her to articulate the importance of crossing boundaries in spatial terms:

The world we now stand in requires us to be able to move both vertically and horizontally, in a way both deep and wide. We need to understand the dynamics of our immedi-ate situation; the place we call home in the physical and in-tellectual sense But we must also come to know the world we live in globally, the places that are Other, the not-home. 3_{Becker thoughtfully concludes her piece, saying “borders are crossed}

and disciplines merge and intertwine daily. Our job as cultural produc-ers is to embrace these changes with the right mix of interrogation, rigor, and enthusiasm. At the same time, we must recognize that at the core of creativity is a blend of the new, the revised, the rethought, and the reima-gined, all attempting to manifest the what through endless permutations of, and debates around, the how” (pp. 207-08).

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We need to be able to understand where we are in relation-ship to the totality, since our daily lives are so directly relat-ed to this totality—from the food we eat, the products we buy, the books we read and the films we see, to the people down the block and to the wars being fought in our name. We no longer live in cultural isolation: all is interrelated. In this sense we have become tourists, pilgrims, nomads and travellers in our daily lives, even if we never leave home and simply—or not so simply—cohabitate in urban life with people who have immigrated from various oth-er nations. What is now our cultural touchstone, or point of reference, if not this strange amalgam of familiar and foreign—the terrain we negotiate between? (pp. 203-04) Interestingly, Becker anchors her discourse of interdis-ciplinarity within the lived environment, comparing an openness to Otherness facilitated by intellectual cross-fer-tilization to abiding in an urban environment which in-cludes ethnic and cultural diversity.

Cross-disciplinarity and Literary Studies: the Impact of Spatial Theory on Literary Criticism

Literary criticism is no stranger to engagement with di-verse disciplines: continental philosophy, for example, has furnished the building bricks of critical theory such as De-construction or Postmodernism. Social movements, too, such as Feminism, have exerted an enormous and even revolutionary influence on textual criticism and have giv-en rise to ground-breaking work on Ggiv-ender and Sexual-ity Studies, both in literary studies and beyond. Further-more, Environmentalism’s intersection with literary anal-ysis has led to the birth of approaches such as Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism and, more recently, the literary and philosophical current of Post-humanism or

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Environmen-15 introduction

tal Humanities. These developments have spawned many publications which apply these philosophical currents to a wide variety of national literatures and which have giv-en rise to journals such as ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment4_{, and Ecozon@: European}

Journal of Literature, Culture and Art5_.

Given the scope of this volume, it seems particularly per-tinent to explore the area of influence of Geographical thought on literary studies, and its profound impact on how we read aspects of the text, canonical features such as setting or descriptive passages, and the interplay be-tween character and background, for example. Such syn-ergies have given rise to the approach now known as Ge-ocriticism, or similar, related disciplinary convergences such as Spatial Humanities and Urban Humanities, new modes of approaching textual interpretation which have inspired the founding of journals such as Literary Geog-raphies6_{. For instance, the related area of literary urban}

studies has been gaining increasing interest, as witnessed by such publications as Intellect’s Journal of Urban Cul-tural Studies, which embraces scholarship that cross-es the humaniticross-es/social science divide, or the new ded-icated series on literary urban studies published by Pal-grave, which also envisions an intersection between liter-ary studies and cultural geography, urban planning, and urban history. Related edited collections by Palgrave in-clude Literary Second Cities (2017), co-edited by Finch, 4_{https://academic.oup.com/isle, consulted 2/2/2018.}

5_{http://www.ecozona.eu, consulted 2/2/2018.}

6_{http://literarygeographies.net, consulted 2/2/2018. See also Westphal}

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Ameel and Salmela, as well as Literature and the Periph-eral City (2015), edited by Ameel. The monumental Pal-grave Handbook of Literature and the City, edited by Jere-my Tambling, also provides a wide range of essays address-ing the city across a span of national literatures and diverse cities. While the aforementioned volumes provide a glob-al overview of urban space and literature, there are few references to Italian cities or literature.

It is these interdisciplinary cross-pollinations that are sponsible for burgeoning new areas and innovative re-search that is capable of transcending conventional boundaries, such as those between the humanities, social sciences and the spatial. And while this tendency towards cross-pollination between disciplines has affected literary scholarship more generally, it also has exerted a profound effect on Italian Studies, as Brook, Mussgnug and Pieri have noted:

Cultural Studies and transnational perspectives have opened up the scholarly field and encouraged a move away from mono-disciplinary, nation-bound modes of en-quiry towards a stronger interest in studying patterns of connectivity. Moving between disciplinary, artistic and medial boundaries is now common and has strong institu-tional backing (2017, p. 381).

The intersection between the spatial and the literary has resulted in a blossoming of publications produced by Ital-ianists which address the city and Italian culture, reflect-ing the tendency to put different subject areas in dialogue with each other7_.

7_{A couple of examples of this current include John Foot and Robert}

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17 introduction

Cross-disciplinarity, Urban Studies and Urban Planning Urban studies is in itself a field of research in which di-verse disciplinary perspectives are employed to interpret complex socio-spatial phenomena, the understanding of which implies the use of multiple interpretive lens-es. In urban planning, the combination of the technical approaches typical of the engineering tradition with hu-manistic and literary approaches appears to be particu-larly fertile and relevant. The main theoretical justifica-tion for this type of disciplinary contaminajustifica-tion is given by Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space production. Accord-ing to the French philosopher, the production of space takes place on three levels: the symbolic/cultural level, the physical/designed level, and the social/lived-space level. These three dimensions of space production in-tertwine in complex and not immediately recognizable ways. It is important to focus briefly on the relationship between cultural production and physical production of space, as this is what really links and justifies the use of literary and cultural representations in the urban plan-ning domain.

Urban and planning policies are built through discursive practices, i.e. through a process of interaction between different actors and stakeholders. Pier Luigi Crosta rightly defines planning as a process of multiple interactions. In this process, urban and territorial representations play an important role. By transferring a concept of Freudian psy-choanalysis to urban policy-making, one might say that

Monica Seger (2015), Serenella Iovino (2016), Enrico Cesaretti and Ele-na Past in the burgeoning area of Ecocriticism and Italian culture. For more on Italian literature and spatial studies, see also S. Ross (2013).

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representations of places contribute to building the ‘set-ting’ that delimits the field of admissible discursive and ar-gumentative practices, as well as to define legitimate pol-icy options. By ‘setting’, psychoanalysts mean the physical and functional environment within which the psychoan-alytic relationship takes place, the organizational rules of the ‘analytical contract’, and the relational rules that reg-ulate the analyst-analyzing relationship. Each discursive practice aimed at building a policy agenda is based on its own setting, made of representations and rules, mostly implicit and shared.

Diverse cultural products – e.g. literary, filmic, journal-istic, photographic and pictorial – contribute to create the shared representations of places on which policies are based. These representations enter the political deci-sion-making process almost unconsciously. They define how a place ‘should be’ and thus contribute to clearly dis-tinguishing between eligible and non-eligible policy op-tions. However, the cultural production of places is nev-er uniform nor homogeneous. Undnev-erneath the thick me-dia patina of places as stereotypes there are minority rep-resentations that can do justice to the complexity of real-ity. Therefore, the use that an urban planner – and more generally an urban policy-maker – can make of literary, filmic, and journalistic sources is always complex and di-versified. For example, it can consist of deconstructing stereotypical images that are far from reality but can pro-duce unequal and unjust outputs. Or it can aim to discov-er and bring to light minority and hidden representations with the aim of subverting hegemonically constructed

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19 introduction

‘settings’. By so doing, alternative policy-making scenari-os can be constructed, that would be otherwise unimagi-nable. In any case, the cultural production of space and its physical construction inevitably go hand in hand, so a ful-ly responsible planner can onful-ly move simultaneousful-ly on these two levels. Interdisciplinarity, therefore, is not an op-tion but an essential condiop-tion for constructing effective and socially just policies.

Urban Space: Why the City?

Everything happens in space! In the course of the twenti-eth century all disciplines, from philosophy to sociology, from economics to literature, made this discovery, which apparently should not appear as an intellectual bomb-shell. In fact, all these disciplines have been featured by a real ‘spatial shift’, i.e. they have placed space at the cen-tre of their reflection. Henri Lefebvre opened his masterly work, The Production of Space, published for the first time in French in 1974, with the following words:

Not so many years ago, the word ‘space’ had a strictly ge-ometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly use it was generally accompa-nied by some such epithet as ‘Euclidean’, ‘isotropic’, or ‘infinite’, and the general feeling was that the concept of space was ultimately a mathematical one. To speak of ‘so-cial space’, therefore, would have sounded strange. The French philosopher pointed out the substantial ab-sence of space from sociological reflection and its pro-gressive expulsion from philosophy towards the physical and mathematical sciences. Before Lefebvre, the analy-sis of social conflict was basically de-spatialized and

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ly focused on the notion of ‘class’. The political and soci-ological debates on social justice were once again based on the a-spatial concepts of alienation and exploitation. It is mainly thanks to Lefebvre that space was placed at the forefront of the analysis of social conflict and power dy-namics.

A similar transformation occurred in the field of Econom-ics. In Italy, starting from the 1960s, the research of some important economists and socio-economists placed space and local territorial systems at the centre of their investi-gations into the development of small and medium en-terprise systems. The works of Giacomo Becattini, Arnal-do Bagnasco, Carlo Trigilia, went beyond the basically a-spatial economic models of neo-classical economics, to study the dynamics of economic development within very specific social, spatial and historical contexts. In 1966, the fundamental work of the German economist Johann Heinrich Von Thunen was translated into English for the first time, his 1826 Theory of the Isolated State, consid-ered the first spatial economic theory. This was perhaps the most obvious sign of the occurrence of a fundamental spatial shift in the field of economic studies.

The discovery of space within literary studies is a more re-cent phenomenon and dates back to the late 1980s. The fact that any story, real or imaginary, is inherently spatial has justified and given strength to the use of spatial the-ories developed in different disciplinary fields for the in-terpretation of literary texts. Even mnemonic studies have an intrinsically spatial dimension, as demonstrated by the fascinating mnemonic/spatial constructions devel-oped throughout history, and magnificently described by

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21 introduction

Frances A. Yates in her famous book The Art of Memory. While different disciplines converge in placing space at the centre of their reflection, there is no doubt that spa-tial and urban studies can only be a field of interdiscipli-nary research. But why ‘urban space’ and not ‘geographical space’? Because just as the different disciplines reorganized their theoretical and empirical investigations in the redis-covery of the the centrality of physical space, cities grew in size and importance. In 1950 the urban population of the planet was estimated at 746 million, or 30% of the world’s population. Sixty-four years later, in 2014, the world urban population was 3.9 billion, corresponding to 54% of the to-tal. In 2050, according to UN estimates, the percentage of the planet’s urban population will be 66% of the total, so the world will be a predominantly urban world.

This massive urbanization of the planet poses a number of challenges of enormous magnitude: environmental and ecological, social and economic. These challenges can only be addressed by equipping ourselves with adequate interpretative and conceptual tools. An interdisciplinary reflection on urban space, therefore, can only be at the centre of the investigative agenda of all those scholars who attribute to their research work a social function for the whole community.

Description of Contributions

The diverse essays included in this collection explore space and the built environment in the modern and con-temporary period and encompass a range of primarily Ital-ian urban spheres. The volume is structured in two parts: an initial, more theoretical section on urban space

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ering Lefebvre; the concept of heteropia; non-places and urban peripheries; urban heritage and the impact of cli-mate change on the urban sphere); and a second section which highlights the literary and visual representation of Italian cities, including Florence, Naples, Milan, and Tu-rin, across genres (novels, travel writing, detective fiction) and media (cinema; photography).

Part I. Theorizing Space(s) and the Environment

The starting point of Teresa Sa’s ‘Henri Lefebvre, urban society and everyday life’ is the work of Lefebvre – a key thinker whose theories resurface throughout many of the contributions in this volume – looking, specifically, at his critique of urban practice and urban planning as it was practiced in France in the aftermath of World War II, un-der the aegis of the state and of the government. The essay focuses on Lefebvre’s criticisms of post-war urban plan-ning, and on his proposals towards what he called a ‘new urbanism’. One of the central aspects of his critique, as de-veloped in Right to the City (Le Droit à la ville, 1968), has to do with the way in which urbanism emerges as a scien-tific and positive theory that would solve all the problems of the city. Viewing urban planning as a technique that can solve planning problems as well as social problems, without questioning their underlying causes in the capi-talist system, amounts to covering up urbanism’s ideolog-ical basis, which is the capitalist ideology in its techno-cratic version. For Lefebvre, space is a social product, the result of a particular social, economic, and political set-up. Sa maintains that you cannot think of urban space as something external to society, to its prevailing values, the

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23 introduction

dominant culture, and the existing power relations. Thus proposals presented by urban planners are not merely ap-plied techniques, but also expressions of ideology. Urban-ism is not a value-neutral technique that can transform the territory: every urban plan assumes a set of values con-nected with a particular conception the city, and such val-ues ought to be explicitly stated in planning proposals. In his proposals for a ‘New Urbanism’, Lefebvre refers plan-ners to the old city, in which ‘habiter’ (dwelling) was more important than ‘habitat’. As well as using ‘transduction,’ a method in which practice and theory are intertwined, planners should also take into account the inhabitants’ systems of meaning. Based that knowledge, urban plan-ning will be the product, not of the strategies and restric-tions of power, but of the strategies and acts of those who inhabit the territory.

In ‘Franco Arminio and the Heterotopia of comunità provvisoria’, Luca Pocci maintains that Arminio is ar-guably one of the most original and controversial voic-es in contemporary Italy. An intervoic-esting aspect of Armin-io’s anti-systematic style of thought is the concept of ‘co-munità provvisoria,’ which is intimately linked to his sus-tained meditation on a marginal and neglected Italy, the Italy of the thousands and thousands of ordinary ‘paesi’, more often than not located off the beaten track of the Belpaese and, consequently, of mass tourism. In this es-say, Pocci discusses the heterotopic implications of Ar-minio’s ‘comunità provvisoria’ and its resistance to the dominant discourses of globalism and glocalism. He ar-gues that the raison d’être of the ‘comunità provvisoria’ is neither a defensive and/or nostalgic return to the

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posed virtue(s) of country life, nor the expression of a cli-chéd anti-modernism fueled by an unconditional rejec-tion of the space of the city and city life in general. Rath-er, Arminio’s ‘comunità provvisoria’ can be seen as an at-tempt at thinking community outside the box of the cur-rent hegemonic doxa of city-based communal living and urban modes of being. This (re)thinking takes place with-in the context of the paesi of Southern Italy, a geograph-ical and cultural context whose marginality assumes the characteristics and function of an overall heterotopia of civil deviation. In discussing the heterotopic community envisaged by Arminio, Pocci’s analysis relies, in particu-lar, on Foucault’s theory, on Agamben’s idea of ‘comunità inessenziale’, and on the concept of ‘becoming minori-tarian’ proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. Pocci’s goal is to show that Arminio’s model of community implies a form of identity that brings together Agamben’s idea of ‘singolarità qualunque’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s radi-cal radi-call to embrace a minoritarian ethos of deviation from the norm.

Richard Ingersoll’s contribution, ‘Public Space in the Age of Climate Change’, confronts us with the two main contemporary transformations of environment and socie-ty and with how these affect – and will increasingly affect in the near future – the way we relate ourselves to public spaces. The first of these transformations is the widespread diffusion of Wi-Fi connectivity and the fact that our social life is increasingly based on the use of web-connected dig-ital devices. The importance of the square and the street has progressively decreased and the use of space is increas-ingly mediated by digital technologies. The second

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trans-25 introduction

formation, on which the author’s contribution is mainly focused, is the rapid and progressive climate change. Sev-enty percent of the world’s large cities will see their spaces threatened by the increase in water levels, which is esti-mated at between 0.2 and 2 metres during the 21st

Cen-tury. This will strongly impact the way public spaces are designed. Ingersoll assesses this impact against five crite-ria that, according to William H. Whyte, determine the quality of public spaces: access, comfort, the fact of hav-ing a balanced density of political and commercial func-tions that provide some points of attraction, access to dem-ocratic attractions such as water, arts and sports, the fact of achieving what Whyte defines as ‘triangulation’, a concept that is reinterpreted by Ingersoll as ‘biographical diversi-ty’. The author then reviews some spatial solutions con-ceived by different cities from Venice to Rotterdam, from New York to Freiburg, which together demonstrate that adaptation to climate change will become one of the main factors in the reorganization of cities and of their public spaces, which will have to both perform ecologically while offering a sense of place for the Wi-Fi generation. In ‘The Social Life of Non-Places: Lessons from Flor-ence’s Peripheries’, Giulio Giovannoni argues that the concept of non-place used by Marc Augé to define some of the main spaces of the contemporary city is an ideolog-ical device, a harbinger of negative effects on urban plan-ning and policy-making. A non-place is essentially de-fined as a space without identity and history in which no social life is possible. Augé’s book is dominated by a clear nostalgic accent, which can also be discerned in works by many of the great critics of contemporary urbanization,

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cluding Henri Lefebvre. Giovannoni’s basic thesis is that Augé’s non-places are in fact the main social spaces in the suburbs and that their dystopian representation prevents policy-makers from adequately understanding, regulating and designing them. His thesis is supported by an empir-ical social life analysis of two petrol stations and of a large shopping centre – i.e. two typical non-places, according to Augé’s criteria – on the outskirts of Florence and Prato, in Tuscany. The result of this analysis confirms that these spaces are rich in social life and have all the potential to be designed as fully successful social spaces. Giovannoni contends that for this to happen, however, we need to get rid of the negative label with which they are usually iden-tified. Such a label in fact prevents us from recognising their potential and from investing the necessary resourc-es in them. Dystopian narrations of non-placresourc-es, therefore, contribute to further exacerbating the existing centre-pe-riphery dualism, where the centre is well equipped and continuously improved, whereas the peripheries are sub-stantially neglected.

In ‘Is There Space for Heritage in Marghera?’ Remi Wacogne contends that recent studies in the field of herit-age have been characterised by a more comprehensive ap-proach, based on a revision of the concepts of ‘landscape’ and ‘value’. Urban heritage has, in turn, received much attention by researchers and professionals, as well as by lo-cal and international organisations, as exemplified by the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Land-scape. The ‘historic urban landscape approach’ it endors-es offers a substantial contribution to cross-disciplinary perspectives on urban space by emphasising the

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‘organi-27 introduction

city’ of historic urban cores and their articulation with sur-rounding areas, as well as by introducing the intangible dimension of their heritage. Although it does not appear to correspond to the usual definition – at least in Italy – of historic urban cores, the città giardino or ‘garden city’ in Marghera has undergone a remarkable conservation pro-cess. As such, what does its heritage consist of, Wacogne asks. Furthermore: who defines it as such and how? And what are the implications of such conservation process for Marghera’s urban space? The città giardino provides an interesting limit case study, in that it allows us to inquire into the very ‘making’ of urban heritage, the opportunities it offers, as well as the critical issues it presents.

Part II. Representing Urban Space: Literature, Film, Pho-tography

This second section focuses on Italian cities and their rep-resentation in modern and contemporary cultural pro-duction, in particular in literature, film and photography. The section opens with Francesca Mugnai and Serena Acciai’s ‘The literary image of Brunelleschi’s Dome’. The authors explain that from the time of Leon Battista Alber-ti unAlber-til today, travellers, writers, arAlber-tists and architects have meditated upon Brunelleschi’s Dome. Along with its ar-chitectural value as a product of a highly technical geni-us, they have seen the close connection of the Dome with the city of Florence and its surrounding hills. This indis-soluble bond has determined the shape and proportions of the Dome, but has also inspired the very structure of Florence itself. Nevertheless, recent writings suggest that during the second half of the twentieth century this bond

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has gradually loosened, transforming what was the phys-ical and visual fulcrum of the city, from being a unique majestic landmark of the valley, into an isolated element with no relation to the magma of the new city. Today, maintain Mugnai and Acciai, it is reduced to a holograph-ic holograph-icon for rushed tourists and a trivial idol for nostalgholograph-ic Florentines. Tracing the evolution of the iconography of the Dome in literature through writers such as Charles Dickens, Stendhal, Herman Hesse, Vasco Pratolini, Aldo Palazzeschi, Giorgio Manganelli – (to mention a few), or through architects – Leon Battista Alberti, Le Corbusier, Giovanni Michelucci and Edoardo Detti (among others) –, offers an unusual perspective from which to observe the transformation of the city. This view considers such de-tail as key to understanding the general; in other words, it considers architecture as a prime element of the city along with the complex interweaving of the mutual rela-tionships between buildings, as well as between buildings and the surrounding landscape. In newly-built areas such connections seem to be weak and incapable of generat-ing specific urban spaces: the paradigm of Brunelleschi’s Dome and its current isolation can offer an opportunity to reflect on how to intervene in the contemporary city. The Tuscan capital also features in the subsequent con-tribution, ‘Florence Overexposed: Early Photography and the Production of the Cinematic City’. The author, Donata Panizza, explains how, in 1852 Florence, as the city’s resonance as ‘Italian Athens’ was blooming inter-nationally, the Alinari brothers took on the burgeoning photographic medium and in a few decades produced a vast archive of photographs of the urban locale’s

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Me-29 introduction

dieval and Renaissance heritage, which circulated wide-ly throughout Europe and the United States. However deliberate the Alinari’s attempts to frame historic mon-uments and areas were, their photos contained traces of mid-to late-nineteenth-century urban upheaval, as Flor-ence changed its medieval structure to become a modern city and the capital of newly unified Italy from 1865 to 1871. The Alinari photographs’ tension between the es-tablishment of the myth of Florence as the cradle of the Renaissance and an uneasy attitude towards moderniza-tion, at once cherished and feared, produced a complex and multi-layered city portrait, where notions of memory and progress, heritage and industry coexist in an unstable balance. The visual and conceptual power of such a por-trait still affects the ways in which Florence is represent-ed today, as is revealrepresent-ed by the analysis of three films par-tially set in the city – Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), James Ivory’s A Room with a View (1986), and Dario Ar-gento’s The Stendhal Syndrome (1996). By drawing upon the vast repository of urban issues embodied in the Alinari photographs, these films establish Florence as the place where something crucial happens, which sets the plot in motion. The reference to renowned photographic views of Florence enables the films to address issues still rele-vant for today’s urban space such as, respectively, the con-flicting needs of a speculative and an affective approach to architecture, the possibility of an emotional interaction with the city, and the mediated nature of the relationship with the urban environment.

In another essay on literature and the city, gender fig-ures predominantly. In ‘Natalia Ginzburg and Gendered

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Space: Country, City and House between Fascist Wom-anhood and Feminist Liberation’, Silvia Ross argues that the rural/urban dynamic and the domestic sphere consti-tute key spatial and textual tropes in two novels by the re-nowned Italian writer. In her first novel, La strada che va in città (The Road to the City, 1942), Ginzburg presents characters who live in the provinces and view urban space as dynamic centres of life. This is the attitude of the pro-tagonist, Delia, who functions as a flâneuse, as she walks to and through urban streets in her youth, only to be rele-gated to the rural sphere when she becomes pregnant out-side of marriage. The book rejects (but at the same time upholds) Fascist rhetoric on motherhood and women’s domestic roles, portraying characters who have bourgeois aspirations to a home, while at the same time problema-tizing the role of the mother and the stereotypical family. Published over four decades later, the novel La città e la casa (The City and the House, 1984), reveals an even greater obsession with the domestic sphere, and sets up a contrast between an idealized country villa outside Peru-gia, and Roman apartments and real estate. At the same time, Ginzburg’s last novel revolves around characters who explore alternative living arrangements, and thus dis-mantles the canonical notion of the family, reflecting a changing Italian society in the wake of second-wave fem-inism. Clearly both texts, while appearing at polar oppo-site ends of Ginzburg’s long literary career, reflect but also largely undermine women’s (subordinate) role in Italian society, while exploring the rural-urban dynam-ic and the importance of domestdynam-ic space of the home. The following chapter concerns the relationship between

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31 introduction

literature and the Northern Italian urban sphere in the mid-twentieth century. Giulia Brecciaroli’s ‘Uncanny City: An Exploration of Milan and Turin in the work of Giorgio Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini’ investi-gates how Milan and Turin have been portrayed in a se-ries of crime stose-ries and novels, written by Giorgio Scer-banenco and Fruttero & Lucentini between the late 1950s and the 1970s. The texts are analyzed as a response to accelerated urbanization, following Italy’s post-war economic ‘boom’ (traditionally dated 1958-62), which is commonly read as a landmark in the country’s recent his-tory. Milan and Turin were radically reshaped by indus-trialization: they were flooded with masses of newcomers arriving from the Northern provinces and the poorer ar-eas of the South, and spread outwards at the expense of the surrounding countryside. In particular, Brecciaroli’s essay examines how the work of Scerbanenco and Frutte-ro & Lucentini articulates the city as a mental framework in which urban spaces are often sites for the emergence of feelings of estrangement, and, in so doing, aims to shed light on the type of modernity that was promoted in the boom years in Italy. Literary analysis draws on psychoan-alytic approaches to the study of urban space. Central to the discussion are the Freudian concept of the uncanny, of which is provided a historical interpretation in relation to the Italian case, and Henri Lefebvre’s idea of urban un-conscious as the re-emergence of aspects that ought to have remained concealed and excluded from the domi-nant organization of space.

In ‘Urban Space as Cognitive Metaphor? Suggestions from Alessandro Baricco’s City’, Beltrami opines that

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in the novel City (1999) Baricco encourages his read-ers to rely on their experience of urban space as a tem-plate to make sense of the narrative. Beltrami offers an al-ternative interpretation of City based on the assumption that the ‘city’ evoked by the title does not actually indi-cate the theme of the novel but rather works as a cogni-tive metaphor. The urban metaphor, in other words, indi-cates how readers should make sense of the narrative as a whole, rather than what the narrative represents. By argu-ing this, Beltrami accounts for the presence in Baricco’s novel of several of what Marc Augé (2008) has described as ‘non-places’; and yet claims that addressing them by adopting Michel Foucault’s (1986) concept of hetero-topia offers a better alignment with the overall reading of the novel, as it endorses the interpretive shift from ‘city’ as a theme to ‘city’ as a cognitive metaphor. This contribu-tion opens up an innovative interpretive path in geocrit-icism by incorporating a cognitive perspective and thus suggesting that more abstract narrative elements, such as plot, might also be understood and explored as spaces. Meris Nicoletto’s essay “Turin: ‘narrating architec-ture’”, focuses on the role of Turin as a character in the three films directed by Davide Ferrario: Tutti giù per ter-ra (1997), Dopo mezzanotte (2003), La luna su Torino (2013). According to Nicoletto, with Tutti giù per terra, Ferrario makes Turin a city which narrates the endless wanderings of an anti-hero, a new flâneur lacking all cer-tainties. The result is a hostile territory where encounters happen by chance and human relationships are doomed to failure. The film Dopo mezzanotte fully realizes Fer-rario’s imaginative experience of the urban landscape as

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33 introduction

a ‘narrating architecture’. The Mole Antonelliana is the magical centre of gravity from which the characters’ sto-ries originate and where they end. At the same time, it is also the space of sight, as the Mole has recently become the seat of the National Museum of Cinema. In La lu-na su Torino, the post-industrial urban landscape is still a mute character yet capable of expressing that sense of in-stability typical of those who live on the 45º parallel, the metaphor for the existential pain and loneliness in the ur-ban environment.

Moving to a Southern Italian urban space, in ‘Naples in Antonella Cilento’s Narrative: “un corpo di animale anti-co” (“an ancient animal’s body”), Assunta De Crescenzo uses the following quote from the writer to illustrate the representation of her native city:

Can you imagine a body without inhabitants? It is impos-sible. Naples is a crowded and confused body, tormented by beings. It is in the rare moments of silence and rest that beauty is stronger, stronger than anything else.

These words, states De Crescenzo, best illustrate Antonel-la Cilento’s image of Naples, where she was born and now lives and works as a renowned, award-winning journalist and writer. In Napoli sul mare luccica (Naples over the sea it shines, Laterza, 2006), the protagonist, that is, the writ-er hwrit-erself, wandwrit-ers the streets of hwrit-er city, reflecting on its history, tradition, and current state – her childhood mem-ories mixing with today’s busy urban life. Her agile, direct prose is stimulating, the texture of her page rich and witti-ly thought-provoking. The city’s different areas, each with their own set of social and linguistic codes, are absorbed by the global metropolis, without ever losing their

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essen-34 giulio giovannoni, silvia ross

tial characteristics. Therefore, to the reader’s eye, Na-ples is the real protagonist, with its geomorphic configu-ration and urban structure, with its peculiarities, limits, and huge potential. Thus, literary space is urban space, and urban space is life space, a sort of mirror which re-flects people’s thoughts and feelings from a millenary tra-dition, with its industrious efforts, its problems, struggles, defeats and successful results. The present essay aims at analyzing the city’s main traits which emerge from the author’s pages. Like Fabrizia Ramondino’s beautiful nar-rative, or Luciano De Crescenzo’s humorously urbane writings, Antonella Cilento’s work elicits not only solid, rational considerations, but also an emotional response, by deconstructing Naples’ oleographic images and, at the same time, revealing a new symbology, made up of perse-verance, creativity and strength of will.

Vincenzo Binetti’s “‘We didn’t cross the border, the bor-der crossed us’: narrating transnational urban spaces as fluid forms of resistance and conflict” investigates how specific literary texts characterizing ‘migrant literature’ today in Italy may indeed problematize and (re)negoti-ate the ways in which urban spaces and communities are commonly perceived and ‘imagined.’ These ‘micro-sto-ries’ narrated by decentralized and nomadic subjects end up, in fact, provocatively and effectively deconstruct-ing and fragmentdeconstruct-ing preconceived and categorical rep-resentations of public spaces, borders, and monumental landscapes – which often constitute ‘iconic’ and symbol-ic points of references necessary to propagandize an of-ficial, collective and homogeneous ‘mapping’ of Italian

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35 introduction

national identity and its territoriality – giving voice, at the same time, to more fluid, potentially destabilizing and subversive cultural-political discourses of resistance and antagonism.

The cities concerned in the various essays reflect in many cases the historical context of Italian society from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, reacting to chang-es in settlement patterns, changing ideas of the nation, in-dustrial development, social movements, environmental transformations and migratory patterns. At the same time, they illustrate innovations in representative devices, mov-ing from literature to photography to cinema. Grounded in spatial theories, the contributions in this volume consti-tute a rich palette of approaches to urban space, showcas-ing the potential of juxtaposshowcas-ing diverse methods of anal-ysis and highlighting crucial issues in urban life. In sum, the diversity of disciplines and areas addressed by this col-lection reflects the potential of transdisciplinary methods which revolve around the spatial, and how these can in-tersect and shed new light on the cities we inhabit, repre-sent, research, theorize and plan.

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